science and culture

This panel seeks to explore the precariousness of media, from its physical integrity and digital ephemerality to the complications of human-machine interaction and the elided histories of players, users, fans, and tech developers. With the current encroachment of generative AI in the workplace, media production, information circulation, fan reception, real estate, and the environment, it becomes urgent to question how precariousness underlies the development, deployment, and dissipation of past media.

Call for Chapter Proposals for an Edited Book

Digital Precarity and Speculative Narratives in the South Asian Context

Panel: Ecocriticism (standing session) co-sponsored by ASLE

PROPOSAL SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Sat July 25, 2026

Submission link: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/20111.

Conference: Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA)

Conference Theme: "Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict”

About the Book

Indian Cultural Heritage: Perspectives is an edited volume that invites interdisciplinary scholarship on the diverse and dynamic dimensions of India's cultural heritage. The volume welcomes original contributions exploring tangible and intangible heritage, indigenous knowledge systems, languages, literature, folklore, performing arts, architecture, material culture, cultural memory, museums, heritage conservation, digital heritage, and contemporary issues of identity, sustainability, and cultural preservation. By bringing together diverse academic perspectives, the volume seeks to advance critical understanding of India's rich cultural traditions and their continuing significance in a rapidly changing world.

Reflection is a key part of Community-Engaged Learning (CEL), but it is not always used in ways that fully support student learning. This panel will look at how reflection can be designed more intentionally to help students think more deeply about their experiences in community settings. Rather than simply describing what they did, students can use reflection to connect their experiences, academic learning, and larger social issues.

CFP: Smell Studies Journal

General Editors: Will Tullett, University of York and Manon Raffard, University of Manchester.

Editorial board: Andrew Kettler, Chanelle Dupuis, Jayanthan Sriram, Ally Louks, Hsuan Hsu, Sandra Barré.

Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature invites article submissions on the topic of “planetary precarity” for its Winter 2027 issue. This special issue will consider how precarity is produced on both local and global scales. As we confront our own possible extinction-level threats caused by climate disaster and, supposedly, a future dominated by artificial superintelligence, we seek to investigate how the Victorians reconceived their own precarity in the face of extractive capitalism and ecological crisis.

This panel considers the often overlooked presence of flora and fauna in early modern print, whether they appear as marginalia, within printers’ ornaments, or as materially integral to books. Animals and plants always carry symbolic value—a single image sometimes carrying diametrically opposed values—and participate in a broader network of signification through emblems, printers’ ornaments, marginalia, and engraven images. Do those values come into tension with each other via the margin, the marginal, and the marginalized? In what ways do peripheral plants and animals comment on questions of identity, like gender, race, or disability?

International Conference

The Artificial Mind: Art and Philosophy after AI

24-25 September 2026

National Gallery of Art

22 Konstitucijos Ave. 

Vilnius, Lithuania

The title “Artificial Mind” references Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind (La Pensée sauvage (1962), a foundational work in anthropology, in which he argues that “savage” and “civilized” thought share the same epistemological architecture – differing not in structure but in mode of operations. While the “civilized” engineer works with purpose-built concepts and tools toward a specific end, the “savage” bricoleur thinks with whatever is at hand, constructing new meanings from fragments.

IV. International Symposium on Clothing Culture in Social Sciences btw. 21.–23.10.2026 at the Marmara University, Istanbul

Planned as a continuation of the SOBİTÜRK Symposium, the SOBİTÜRK 2026 themed around Clothing Culture aims to examine the phenomenon of clothing from a multidisciplinary social sciences perspective. Among the primary objectives of the symposium are to investigate the transformations of clothing culture throughout cultural geography from past to present and to discuss the interaction between traditional clothing patterns and modern/global fashion understandings.

eds. Kate Genevieve, Jessica Hurley, Juan Francisco Salazar

An anthology marking fifty years since the launch of NASA’s Voyager mission and the Golden Record, inviting outer space studies and artistic contributions to grow just, plural futures for the second space age. This volume takes the Voyager Golden Record as a catalyst for creatively rethinking planetary futures. Bringing together artists with historians of science, STS scholars, ethnographers and community practitioners engaged with outer space, the book combines critique with reparative and imaginative work. 

Concept Note

Two-Day International Conference (likely to be ICSSR Sponsored) on  “Loss of Indigenous Knowledge in the Age of Digital Humanities: Preservation, Power, and the Politics of Representation” (Hybrid Mode)

Industrial Modernity: Energy, Labor, and Media in 20th Asia

SESSION DESCRIPTION

Afrofuturism, Latinx altermundos, Indigenous futurisms, solarpunk, cli-fi — the speculative modes through which BIPOC writers have imagined, contested, and survived the present are not marginal subgenres. They are among the most politically urgent literary formations of the last half-century, and among the least fully mapped by existing scholarship. This special session invites papers that read across these formations to ask: what does speculative fiction do when it is written from the borderlands, from the barrio, from the reservation, from the maquiladora corridor, from communities that have been made to inhabit the dystopian present that other traditions only project?